Marilyn vos Savant is recognized as the person with the highest IQ in the world. This brought her glory as well as trouble.
American female author Marilyn vos Savant is famous for having the highest IQ in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records. She held the title for nearly five years before the entry was removed from Guinness.
Marilyn vos Savant was born in 1946 in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She took the last name Savant because her family had a tradition of men following her father’s last name, and women following her mother’s last name.
Marilyn is of Italian, Czechoslovak and German descent and has Austrian ancestry. According to the Chicago Tribune, she is a descendant of physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.
Possessing an IQ twice as high as the average person, Marilyn never graduated from college.
She showed an aptitude for math and science from an early age. At the age of 10, Marilyn underwent two intelligence tests. The first is the Stanford-Binet test with a set of questions that measure cognitive ability through 5 factors. The second is the Mega Test, a test designed to measure IQs above 145. As a result, Marilyn scored a Mega Test of 186, Stanford-Binet of 228, which is huge. After analyzing, experts determined that 10-year-old Marilyn has the same intelligence as a 23-year-old. Meanwhile, the IQ of an average adult only ranges from 85 to 115. Steve Jobs has an IQ over 160, Elon Musk IQ 155 and Mark Zuckerberg IQ 152. All these billionaires are in the top 0.1%. the smartest in the world.
However, the prodigy was not aware of it. “At that time, no one said anything to me. I thought this was a common metric that many other people achieve,” she said.
She still spends most of her time working in her father’s laundromat and earning extra income by collaborating with the local press.
At the age of 16, Marilyn married before attending Meramec Community College and then pursuing a degree in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.
But despite possessing an IQ twice as high as the average person, the American prodigy never graduated from college. She dropped out of school after two years and started to finance herself through investing and real estate.
Within five years, she had accumulated enough to support herself and devoted herself to pursuing a career in writing. She wrote novels, short stories, and collaborated with magazines and newspapers mainly on political satire.
In 1985, she suddenly became famous when the Guinness Book of World Records recognized the person with the highest IQ on the planet . The name Marilym vos Savant became the focus of the media. A series of radio and television programs lined up to interview the young girl. Her sky-high IQ makes everyone curious. The popular animated series of the time The Simpsons also made an episode about her in 1999.
At the same time, her two children from her first marriage were grown. Marilyn decided to move to New York City, to enjoy a new life, to be known by many people.
In 1986, the person with the highest IQ in the world began to answer questions sent by readers to Parade magazine. It is worth mentioning that after the magazine published a brief biography of Marilyn, the title “smartest person on the planet” quickly attracted a large number of readers.
The Ask Marilyn column is officially opened, a place to answer questions about all areas, from quizzes to life problems. The American genius stuck with the column for about 30 years. This is also her biggest career.
In 1987, she married her third husband, surgeon Robert K. Jarvik, and became the chief financial officer of Jarvik Heart Corporation. She and her husband became the smartest couple in New York City. In the following period, she in turn served on the board of directors of the National Council of Economic Education, the advisory board of the National Association for Talented Children.
In 2003, Marilyn vos Savant received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Jersey.
Possessing a high IQ and being praised for her superhuman intelligence, Marilyn vos Savant cannot avoid the troubles that come from the name of a genius.
Many expect her to be a portable encyclopedia or a living computer.
She has repeatedly publicly affirmed that IQ is not the deciding factor for everything and that, apart from intelligence, she is completely normal like everyone else. In addition, IQ tests are also unreliable.
“People expect me to be a portable encyclopedia or a living computer, something very mysterious. But really, I’m not,” Marilyn shared.
In Marilyn’s view, people who are smart or have a high IQ have no responsibility or obligation to contribute to society or become leaders or superheroes that change the world. She has complete rights and can live and work as she pleases.
Besides, high IQ does not help her avoid mistakes. Once, when talking about the house she used to live in in St. Louis, Marilyn describes it as “a place where you can see the stars, unlike here. In New York, we only see Venus.” Immediately, the former prodigy admitted he was wrong, Venus is not a star.
She wrote a series of plays, wrote nearly 10 books, but never posted a forum to talk about culture, history, or politics. Her modesty and calm make people often forget that she possesses superhuman intelligence.
But no matter how humble she was, she could not avoid special attention from some individuals. Many people have questioned with such a rare brain, why Marilyn vos Savant does not pursue a higher goal but stays with the Q&A column forever.
In 1995, Herb Weiner, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, set up the website: Marilyn is Wrong (Marilyn wrong) to look for mistakes in the process of answering questions from readers. He thinks that a high IQ is not a reason for others to believe in Marilyn completely.
What really annoyed the engineer, however, was probably the fact that she was only in charge of a magazine column instead of doing bigger things like many other geniuses do.
The fact that Guinness removed the item People with the highest IQ in the world in 1990 was also an excuse for Herb Weiner to doubt Marilyn’s intelligence.
The decision, he said, shows that the stat is unreliable, and it also ensures that no one has a chance to beat Marilyn vos Savant for the title of “smartest person on the planet”.
Of course, Weiner’s actions were not baseless. In fact, Marilyn also made mistakes in the process of answering readers’ questions. With every mistake pointed out, the female genius studies carefully and frankly admits it.
What happened to her in 1990 was a terrible nightmare, a real academic persecution.
That September, when answering a reader’s question about the classic Monty Hall probability problem, Marilyn never expected it to bring such great trouble.
Genius Marilyn vos Savant was once heavily criticized by academia.
The puzzle is as follows: Suppose you are on a television game. The host gives you a choice of three reward doors. Behind one door is a new car, behind the other two are two goats.
You choose the first door. The host knows well what is behind the door and says that behind the third door is a goat and then asks if you want to change your choice.
The reader’s question is whether the re-selection will give the player more wins.
Marilyn replied: “Players should change. Picking the first door, he has a 1/3 chance of winning but the chance of winning the 2nd is 2/3”.
Although the outstanding woman gave the correct answer, her answer was not accepted. In return, she received more than 10,000 replies with harsh insults. Many called her a “snobbish fool”.
Even the deputy director of the Center for Defense Information at that time and a researcher of Statistical Mathematics from the National Institutes of Health also sent letters, saying that she was incompetent.
Dr. Scott Smith from the University of Florida joined this criticism. According to him, the change does not make sense, the win rate on both doors is the same.
She wrote: “She exaggerates her abilities so much that she doesn’t seem to grasp the basic principles of probability math. This country already has too many math blind people. We don’t need more “people with the highest IQ in the world” to join that team.”
Many scholars have a reputation for sarcasm Marilyn should reread the textbook or ask high school students to answer for help.
“She gave the wrong answer, but on the bright side, if all other doctors are wrong, our country is really in serious trouble,” said Dr. Everett Harman of the US Military Research Institute to the female genius.
The backlash from academics was so intense that Marilyn vos Savant spent the next three periods explaining her reasoning to be correct. Even with a clear answer, she was constantly harassed. “I think you’re still wrong, obviously, in the way women think,” scorned one reader.
Monty Hall and Marilyn’s answer continued to be debated for the next 25 years. It is integrated into the student assignments of thousands of classrooms across the country. A computer program was also built to prove Marilyn’s inference. The percentage of people who supported her solution gradually increased.
By the end of 1992, the percentage of readers who agreed with Marilyn’s answer increased from 8% to 56%. At research institutes, this number increased from 35% to 71%.
Robert Sachs, a professor of mathematics at George Mason University, is among those to change his mind. Different from the initial disparaging words, when he realized his mistake, he immediately sent another letter expressing his remorse.
“After coming out of my initial blindness, I am learning to be humble. I swear to repentance and am ready to answer all inquiries from others (in connection with Monty Hall). This is indeed a great shame for a scholar,” Sachs wrote.